As one of the first artists to realise that music, fashion and theatre could be brought together on stage or on TV to create something uniquely potent, David Bowie made several legendary appearances on the small screen performing his songs.

Soul Train, performing Fame and Golden Years, 1975

With nicotine hair, a snow-white tan and cheekbones as hollow as the stardom he’s singing about, Bowie looks profoundly weird shimmying on a podium in the middle of the music show Soul Train’s famous dancers. He’s also, it’s safe to say, less than sober. He’s miming, but it doesn’t matter. The song sounds savagely vital, and Bowie is coolness personified.

It’s hard to imagine a greater creative gear-change from being coked up on Soul Train to performing carols with Bing Crosby on his Christmas special, but change was the modus operandi of Bowie’s entire career, and his chops as an old-fashioned crooner were an integral part of his persona. Despite the cosy surroundings, Bowie still looks and sounds otherworldly, and the blend of his voice and Bing’s is beautiful.

Saturday Night Live, performing The Man Who Sold the World, TVC15 and Boys Keep Swinging, 1979

Bowie had cleaned up and moved to Berlin but returned to New York to perform on SNL. Always alert to stirrings in pop culture’s avant garde, he brought with him Joey Arias and Klaus Nomi, both leading lights of downtown New York’s performance art scene. During TVC15 the pair drag around a toy poodle while Bowie wears a skirt; Boys Keep Swinging is performed with Bowie in a giant marionette costume. It’s spectacular and subversive.

The Tonight Show, performing Life on Mars? and Ashes to Ashes, 1980

Promoting his appearance on Broadway in The Elephant Man, together with his new album Scary Monsters, an almost natural-looking Bowie in a red bomber jacket and blue pegged trousers nevertheless brings the house down with a stratospheric version of Life on Mars? It’s a measure of his confidence that he immediately launches into what was then new material – Ashes to Ashes, which revisited Major Tom and returned him to the top of the charts, in the UK at least.

The Concert for New York City, performing America, 2001

A month after 9/11, Bowie opened the concert at Madison Square Garden organised by Paul McCartney in response to the attacks with a version of Simon and Garfunkel’s America. Played on a small keyboard, but sung with operatic passion, its chorus “We’ve all come to look for America” is an incredibly moving expression of his relationship with the nation, his adopted home.